Cloud Technology News
Just back from SuiteWorld 2011!
Posted by Kevin Lalor in Cloud Technology News on June 1st, 2011
It was great to see so many of you at SuiteWorld, thanks for taking the time to come by and say hello! For those that don’t know, SuiteWorld is NetSuite’s annual user and partner conference –held last week in San Francisco. All of us at Bi101 enjoyed meeting with the NetSuite management team, our clients and numerous prospects over the 4-day conference, it was a genuinely rewarding experience. It also confirmed two important drivers of Bi101’s continued success: the first is that cloud-based solutions have gone mainstream, this superior delivery model is here to stay; second, we made a great decision when we chose to embrace NetSuite as our platform partner – as a result, we are a preferred partner to the leading cloud platform company in the market.
Our support of NetSuite is based in part on the fact that they have committed to investing over $50 million in research and development (R&D) this year to ensure that the NetSuite applications remain the most feature-rich and flexible solutions in the market. Further, under pinning these market-leading applications is a core technology layer that is second to none. What many customers don’t even realize is that Oracle provides most of the core technology (i.e. database, application servers, etc) upon which NetSuite runs – this offers the Small-to-Medium sized business market (SMB) the IT performance on par with the largest corporations in the world, yet with the flexibility demanded by SMB managers and their need to be more agile to capitalize on changing market requirements.
A compelling example, Groupon – the social coupon company – was highlighted as a perfect example of how NetSuite’s applications, coupled with a solution partner for training and support, has allowed them to expand into five international markets in just six weeks. Billed as one of the fasted growing companies, Groupon plans to be in 26 international markets within the next three months using NetSuite OneWorld. OneWorld addresses the complex multi-national needs of global enterprises and can readily enable businesses to adjust for currency, taxation and legal compliance differences at the local level, with regional and global business consolidation and roll-up. Now you might not have the international aspirations of Groupon, but it’s good to know that the infrastructure that is enabling their rapid growth and expansion can also be deployed to help your business reach its next level. Need help with NetSuite? We’d be happy to discuss how our deployment and training can accelerate the adoption of NetSuite and ensure that your solution is rolled out and supported properly.
We learned a lot this year at SuiteWorld 2011 and look forward to helping you implement your NetSuite needs in the coming months. If you don’t have plans to attend next year already, we’d encourage you to do so – we’ve found that it’s a great place to learn best practices and network with companies that have similar experiences. We’d love to see you all at next year’s event – mark your calendar for SuiteWorld 2012 in San Francisco on May 13 – 17th.
Scott
What is Cloud Computing and why is it so important?
Posted by Kevin Lalor in Cloud Technology News on November 11th, 2010
Cloud computing is really just a fancy term for utility computing. In other words, applications, platforms or infrastructure are made available from a central service provider, similar to our
utility companies for electricity, water and telecommunication. This concept is explored in some detail in Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch. A must read for anybody trying to get their hands around the cloud concept.
Unlike a traditional IT infrastructure (in which computer hardware is physically located within the office), the hardware in a Cloud infrastructure is located off-site in a datacenter. Using only a PC and an internet connection, clients gain access to a full-featured enterprise-grade IT infrastructure (such as ERP, VOIP, E-Mail, Storage), while paying only for the resources consumed. In fact, applications such as Google Apps for Business provides 25 GB of Space for every account. Think of how many servers that equals.
Cost Savings
Since Cloud is fully-managed off-site (24 hours a day, 365 days a year), it can be far more cost-effective than deploying and supporting an IT infrastructure in-house. The infrastructure is “rented,” so there are no up-front hardware costs (think back to those servers). There’s also no burden of electricity costs, of dedicating space to hardware storage, and no need to hire/retain IT personnel to support hardware on-site.
Consumption-based Billing
Consumption is billed on a utility basis (by resources consumed, like electricity) with little or no upfront cost, making the Cloud particularly attractive to start-ups for whom deploying a new infrastructure in-house may be expensive. Specific applications may be rented by the seat, with any upgrades or bug fixes applied automatically through the back end.
Think of the Cloud as electricity—you can have as much or as little of a service as needed— making it easily scalable for business growth. If you need more outlets in your house, you put in a couple, and plug what you need into them. Determine your scalability needs and the adjustments can be made seamlessly and quickly on the back-end . You scale back, don’t use them.
Cloud can also double as a Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity program. Since data is stored off-site, even if all your servers got flooded or damaged in an earthquake at your place of business, your data would be unaffected and employees could continue working using any internet-connected PC.
In future blogs, I will be exploring practical, value filled uses for Cloud computing and software for businesses. It is a tranformational technology, one that every business can use to drive down costs, increase efficiencies, and change the workplace.
Cloud Computing Continues to Grow in the Enterprise
Posted by Kevin Lalor in Cloud Technology News on March 1st, 2010
Recently Gartner announced that worldwide software-as-a-service (SaaS) revenue is forecast to reach $7.5 billion in 2009, a 17.7 percent increase from 2008 revenue of $6.4 billion.
The cloud computing market continues to evolve, with more vendors creating cloud computing offerings and more companies becoming comfortable moving to the cloud.
Bi101 deploys cloud apps to both the enterprise and small business. From our experience, two computing areas are driving both groups to the cloud: content, communications and collaboration (CCC) and customer relationship management (CRM). Garner confirms that these two areas are driving the transition to cloud computing within the enterprise:
Worldwide Software Revenue for SaaS Delivery Within the Enterprise Application Software Markets (Millions of Dollars)
| 2009 | 2008 | |
| Content, Communications and Collaboration (CCC) | 2,573 | 2,143 |
| Office Suites | 68 | 56 |
| Digital Content Creation (DCC) | 62 | 44 |
| Customer Relationship Management (CRM) | 2,281 | 1,872 |
| Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) | 1,239 | 1,176 |
| Supply Chain Management (SCM) | 826 | 710 |
| Other Application Software | 472 | 387 |
| Total Enterprise Software | 7,521 | 6,388 |
Source: Gartner (November 2009)
What’s interesting about this cloud computing evolution is a single SaaS offering’s ability to provide the same impact to both the enterprise and small business. Rarely have we seen this in software markets of the past; the enterprise and SMBs have typically required vastly different offerings, in terms of complexity and scale. And it was rare that a single vendor could deliver both. Now, the same version of Google’s Postini can serve 15 users or 1,000 users equally well.
Cloud Computing Value Differences
The drivers of the shift to the cloud are different though. From what we’ve experienced, enterprises are switching to offerings like Google’s Postini for email security and encryption and Google Apps for collaboration to lower IT costs. Enterprises typically have the sophistication and resources to have in-house solutions already in place. Cloud apps simply deliver the same functionality at lower costs, allowing companies to move from expensive legacy solutions like Microsoft’s Sharepoint to SaaS offerings.
For smaller businesses, the main drivers of cloud applications are increased productivity, security and reliability. Small companies typically don’t have a sophisticated WAN or LAN already in place to provide remote access for collaboration and data sharing, so cloud computing expands their computing power at a very reasonable price.
Gartner predicts that SaaS revenue will continue to increase in the enterprise application markets through 2013. It will be interesting to compare these growth rates to the SMB market growth rates, and to see which segment provides a greater overall impact to the economy.
My bet now is that cloud computing will have a greater economic impact in the SMB market, allowing small companies to dramatically increase productivity to contribute more jobs to the economy.
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Postini Adds Message Log Search
Posted by Kevin Lalor in Cloud Technology News, SaaS for Financial Management on January 19th, 2010
If you’re using Google’s Postini for email security and encryption, tracking your email history just got easier.
By February 4, 2010, Google will add this helpful feature to Systems 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 200.
From Google:
With the new Message Log Search function, users can now track what happened to an inbound or outbound message — whether it was delivered, quarantined, archived, encrypted, or other disposition — and see if the message triggered a specific filter. Message Log Search also enables users to track all messages for a specific sender, recipient, domain, or IP address.
While the message security service stores information about your messages in a log (such as the message header and how the message was processed), it does not store the actual messages. If you want to save search results for later analysis, you’ll be able to export a .csv file.
This is a nice feature for Postini users and will help us to determine what has been happening to our messages: how messages were processed, filtered and delivered, and it will give insight in the traffic patterns for our domain.
We’ll try running some searches on the data using a variety of criteria and queries and let you know what we think.
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